This year, as has been true for the past few years, racism has made headline news. Deep divisions have been put in the spotlight, and it can sometimes feel as if that spotlight has served to dig them even deeper.

But we can’t confront racial strife if we don’t acknowledge that it exists. The challenge is that racism does not just have a deep root, but has many deep roots in our lives, communities, and country.

Like much of our nation, I’ve been doing substantial soul-searching to seek understanding about my own actions, beliefs, and behaviors, as well as the systemic patterns that write collective actions, beliefs, and behaviors in quite large letters across our society.

What I’m coming to understand through this reflection is startling, and might surely seem like a non-sequitur. But here it is:

The widespread Christian failure to understand and experience God as Trinity has provided a breeding ground for both implicit and explicit racism.

To understand a sin that is as old as history, it is helpful to go back to one of the oldest questions of human inquiry.

When I studied the history of philosophy in the early 1960s, I was told that the first and foundational philosophical problem that keeps recurring in every age and in different forms is “the problem of the one and the many”: How can there be any primal unity to reality when what we see is so much obvious and seemingly conflicting diversity? Is there any unifying pattern to “the ten thousand things” that overwhelm our horizon?

This remains our issue today, at least for those of us who look for “big-picture narratives” that speak to the confusion that still confronts us. Theology always made the claim that it had the power to offer us the biggest picture of all (the “Reign of God” in Jesus’ language), even though it all too often offered us rather small, self-serving, and tribal images of God. Without knowing it, and contrary to its own unique revelation, I think much of Christian history did the same thing.

Let’s look at one of the very destructive effects of a diminished, anti-transformative image of God on the perennial and ubiquitous issue of racism. Today, most Christian notions of the Divine are much more formed by pagan and Greek conceptions than by the central Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Even the Latin word for God, Deus, is a direct reformulation of the Greek word for the head of the gods, Zeus. I believe racism is often rooted in this distorted view of divinity; rather than reflecting the One who created all things in God’s own “image and likeness” (Genesis 1:26-27), we instead make God into a mascot who, as Anne Lamott brilliantly quips, hates all the same people we do.

When you start with a conception of God as an old white man sitting in the clouds, it is of little surprise that white men, preferably empowered white men, are considered the closest to God and the most worthy of respect and value. It becomes a top-down universe, a pyramid much more than the circular dance (perichoresis). Perichoresis, the Trinity as dance, is indeed the precise and daring image that ignited some of our early church fathers’ finest intuitions, prompting consensus around this utterly new revelation of God. It took them three centuries to make full sense out of Jesus’ often-confusing language about what he named “Father,” how he understood himself, and what he named the “Holy Spirit.” Our common form of dualistic thinking just could not process such three­-fold and one-ness evocations at the same time.

It was frankly, illogical — and even silly.

When you start with a conception of God as an old white man sitting in the clouds, it is of little surprise that white men, preferably empowered white men, are considered the closest to God.

How could we reconcile what seemed like a huge logical and theological conundrum, especially for thoroughgoing monotheistic Jews? The human ego is so resistant to anything its mind cannot quickly process and control; it prefers separateness and a sense of superiority — precisely what the Trinity rejects and denies.

Yet if we do not discern and celebrate difference on the level of what visible humanness means, what hope is there on issues where “difference” is often much more striking (gender, power, class, education, etc.)? Every one of these issues is searching for its own locus of authority today, and as naïve as it might sound to some, I believe Trinity does provide such an appropriate locus of authority for those who are willing to trust and allow it. God is precisely one by holding together very real difference.

Richard Rohr, OFM, a globally recognized ecumenical teacher bearing witness to the universal awakening within Christian mysticism and the Perennial Tradition. He is a Franciscan priest of the New Mexico Province and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation and Living School in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Father Richard’s teaching is grounded in the Franciscan alternative orthodoxy — practices of contemplation and lived kenosis (self-emptying), expressing itself in radical compassion, particularly for the socially marginalized. His spirituality of creativity, vulnerability, and interdependence is the inspiration behind The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation.

About Mike Morrell

Mike is the Communications Director for the Integral Theology think-tank Presence International, co-founder of The Buzz Seminar, and a founding organizer of the Wild Goose Festival. Mike curates contemplative and community experiences via Authentic World, Relational Yoga, the ManKind Project, and (H) Opp, taking joy in holding space for the extraordinary transformation that can take place at the intersection of anticipation, imagination, and radical acceptance. Mike is also an avid writer, publishing consultant, author coach, futurist, and curator of the book-reviewing community at TheSpeakeasy.info. He lives with his wife and two daughters in North Carolina.

4 Responses to Divine Dance: How the Trinity Dissolves Racism by Richard Rohr

Bravo! Thanks Mike for the reminders. We must love ourselves and accept God’s love for us as we are (warts and all so to speak). Then we can truly love others as ourselves no matter how we may differ in gender, beliefs, etc.

I’m just finishing reading “The Divine Dance . . .” and am sensing a deep “paradigm shift” within my Being. Thanx, praise and glory be to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and to the two of you who lived out that Blessed Trinity in the writing of the book.

The Divine Dance has been so valuable to me and a few of my dear friends. So much so, that we are meeting to study this book together. This book was ordered by me early, and with that order, I was offered some bonuses, for which I am so grateful; however, I am having trouble accessing those! Is it too late to take advantage of the gifts offered, and is there a study guide we could utilize in order to get the most out of this beautiful work?
Thank you so much for putting this book out into the world!